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abvj[T W O]
This is how the team decides to relocate to Portland:
Back at the cave, Eliot, Parker, and Hardison huddle around the table in the center of the room as they argue endlessly over the implausibility of an Eliot Signal. Eliot still doesn’t understand how he would be able to see it in broad daylight, Hardison assures him he’ll come up with a proper answer because he’s Hardison, and Parker is stuck on whether or not his signature should be a wolf or a knife.
Eliot prefers the knife, Parker the wolf. Before Parker can begin a whole other conversation about what her own call signal would be and how if they took out the north wall and built an elevator, they would be able to fit their own personalized cars in the cave, Sophie decides it is time to intervene. Also, she hears Nate’s footsteps in the distance, the shuffle of his gait closing in. After they both spent the entire trip back listening to the very detailed, very well thought out pro and con list entitled Why We Should Keep the Batcave, Sophie figures one more mention of it would probably put Nate even further over the edge.
After the day he’s had, he really doesn’t need any help in that regard.
So, she cuts off whatever Parker was going to say by offering: “How about a wolf with a knife in its mouth?” as a plausible alternative. “Or, just, you know, a fist getting ready to hit something. Like a punch. Like a punching fist. What describes Eliot better than that?” Sophie makes the motion with her arm, her fingers curled tightly inward as she thrusts her fist upward.
Eliot grins in appreciation and mutters in Hardison’s general direction: “Now that’s what I’m talking about. See? She gets it, man.”
Parker merely laughs.
“Sophie,” Nate says, now within earshot. His tone is a cross between annoyance and amusement and she looks over to see him stalking towards them, some sort of map under his uninjured arm. He’s trying very hard not to smile. “Don’t encourage them.” He moves some things out the way and unfolds the large map across the table, using a rock and a taser of all things to keep the edges from curling under. He looks at Sophie and cocks his head towards the map of the continental United States. She glances at him, then the map, and doesn’t quite understand why he’s looking at her as if she should be able to read his mind. When she just continues to stare at him blankly, he says, “Close your eyes and point,” as if it explains everything.
She arches an eyebrow. “And what?”
“And then we’ll now where we’re headed.”
Sophie laughs. She simply can’t help it. Here he is in the same clothes he’s been wearing for days, staring at her as if she, of all people, holds all the answers and she just has to laugh because this has to be a joke, it just has to be – except Nate Ford doesn’t know how to joke. Any other reaction seems wildly inappropriate and she reaches for him, placing the back of her hand flat against his forehead. “Are you feeling alright?” she asks. “I think we should take you to the hospital, I really do. I know I said you’d be fine, but I’m not a doctor. I did pretend to be one once, but as you would be quick to point out that means absolutely nothing.”
Shrugging her off, Nate merely motions to the map with a look that clearly reads: get on with it already.
“Seriously?” She looks at him incredulously. “Seriously? This is what your big plans involved? Are you insane? Wait,” Sophie holds up a hand to stop whatever is about to come out of his mouth. “Do not bother to answer that. I already know the answer.”
Nate shrugs. “The plans are a work in progress.”
“Well just for future clarification, Nate, when you tell somebody I have big plans you should probably specify that such plans have not been properly flushed out yet, nor even really been thought all the way through, and therefore people should think twice before blindly trusting them.”
“Blindly trusting? Sophie that’s a little –”
It is at that exact moment when Hardison cuts in: “Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Let us just slow this train down for a hot minute. Why does Sophie get to choose?”
“I don’t want to choose. You do it.”
“I don’t understand why we have to go anywhere,” Parker says and Sophie turns her head to glance in her direction. Parker is doing this thing with her face that makes Sophie both sad and happy at the same time because it means Parker is having an emotion, but she’s not sure whether or not she should show it because she doesn’t really understand what it is. “I was just starting to like Boston.”
Eliot, to his credit, does not roll his eyes, but when he speaks his tone is harsher than necessary. “Think about it, okay? After the last few weeks we could use a change of scenery. It’s in our best interest to move on and set up shop elsewhere.”
They’re all quiet for a moment, the five of them standing around the large table, the map spread out between them. Nate looks at Sophie and Sophie looks at Nate and after a moment of careful consideration and rationalization along the lines of what could we possible have left to lose? she merely shrugs her approval, arms crossing in an act of acceptance.
The rest follow. They usually do.
Except Hardison who says, “I still don’t understand why Sophie gets to choose. I object to the blatant display of favoritism.”
“Oh, for chrissakes, Hardison, if it means that much to you, why don’t you just do it?”
“Fine,” he makes a show out of stretching his arms and cracking his fingers. Sophie can’t decide whether or not she wants to laugh or roll her eyes. The latter wins out. “I will.”
“Well thank god for that,” Nate deadpans. “It’s settled then.” He motions towards Hardison. “You’ll pick and no matter what the outcome is, no matter how much somebody may dislike it, there will be no further objections, okay? End of discussion.” Nate takes a moment to look at every single one of them before continuing, “We are moving on.”
After they all agree Hardison makes a huge display out of rolling up his nonexistent sleeves and closing his eyes, exaggeratedly moving his index finger around and around in circles. But before he can actually point, Parker interrupts him.
“Choose someplace warm –”
“–And with good shopping–”
“–And someplace near water –”
Hardison glances towards Nate, waiting for him to interject. In typical Nate fashion, however, he simply says, “Just get on with it, Hardison.”
With a thud, the tip of his index finger lands on the far left corner of the map. They all lean in carefully to see it covering a tiny dot labeled Portland.
Eliot is the first to speak: “Damn it, Hardison.”
*
It didn’t stop with one job. She, Gabrielle, and the man Sophie only knew only as Anthony formed something akin to a team over the following year. They spent weeks planning an extraction and always executed it without fault, robbing the ridiculously wealthy of some of their most prized possessions and pocketing the money from the resulting sale. She never told her father, but she suspects he knew. Sophie spread herself thin working both sides and taking care of her brothers and sisters – teaching them how to tie their shoes and the art of arithmetic – but the money Gabrielle provided her with after was more than worth it. Sophie kept it hidden in between the fading pages of Tolstoy and Dickens and under her mattress. Her father spent his money on cheap whiskey. She spent hers on groceries and electric, transitioning into the role as mother, of caretaker for her siblings that had already lost one parent and were quick on their way to losing another.
Like her father before them, Gabrielle and Anthony kept Sophie on the sidelines. Only instead of painting forgeries of masterpieces, she studied materials on sculptures and priceless antiquities until her eyes bled and then replicated them impeccably.
It took time and more than a little effort on Sophie’s behalf, but after careful planning and strategy, Gabrielle, in turn, started to accept Sophie for what she was – a protégé, a valuable asset. Sophie soaked up all the knowledge the surrounding world had to offer and Gabrielle, well, Gabrielle quite liked having somebody to bestow all of her own personal knowledge on, she liked being able to mold Sophie – young, still horribly impressionable Sophie – into a perfect, indestructible thief.
In another life, maybe, Sophie could have gained admittance into Oxford or Cambridge. She maybe could have studied art the respectable way and become something honest, something that would have made her mother proud. But the life of thief, of a liar, while dishonest, was an alluring one. Deep down, under all the lies and facades she had molded and perfected so early on, she had known, since that very first day in the café near Buckingham with that tantalizing thrill running up her spine, with her father’s warm, proud smile beaming down at her as encouragement that for better or worse this was the life she was meant to lead.
It would have been all too easy to blame her father for forcing her down this path, for planting the seed that grew and blossomed inside of her, pushing her towards a life of crime. But Sophie has always been smarter than most and she knows she was not forced into this life. She chose it. Some people are born to be mothers, inventors, doctors. Sophie was born to be an artist – just not in the most conventional way.
It was on her seventeenth birthday that she left England to travel Europe against both her father and Aunt Emily’s wishes. There was a conversation, of course, a long weekend spent in the country with her aunt while her father found solace back home in the bottom of a bottle. Upstairs, her brothers and sisters slept soundly, and Sophie fidgeted in her seat under Emily’s watchful gaze, but her fingers were steady as they wrapped around her glass of water.
“I’m going to go away for a little while,” she said. Her voice was smooth and certain and filled with practiced confidence. “I need you to promise me that you’ll take care of them. I need you to promise me that they’ll be okay.”
Emily reached out, covering one of Sophie’s hands with her own. “I promise,” the older woman said and because Sophie had long since developed the keen ability to read people, to distinguish lies from the truth, she sighed, breathed, and knew her family would be all right.
Sophie left in the dead of night, made her rounds to her siblings’ rooms and kissed each of their foreheads, murmuring her goodbyes into the darkness. Sophie placed all the money she had collected over the years on her aunt’s nightstand with a note for her father telling him not to worry and reminding him that her mother had taught her to be strong and that she would be fine.
Everything was left behind – her clothes, her jewelry, and the pair of gorgeous, leather boots she had bought after her very first job with Gabrielle. The only thing she took with her were the clothes on her back and her mother’s old, worn book of art with the pages wrinkled by time, the spine cracked right down the middle.
There was regret and guilt stuck in the back of her throat, the taste so bitter she nearly choked on it, but she swallowed around it and shoved it deep down. She buried it in the place where she kept memories of her mother, of those early years with her fingers warm and solid over Sophie’s as they traced the outlines of ballerinas and landscapes. She buried it in the place where she hid all the things she wished she could forget.
To say she never looked back would be a lie, but Sophie was nothing if not an excellent liar, so nobody ever suspected otherwise.
It was during this time that Gabrielle taught her the art of the perfect con.
Her father laid the groundwork, of course, by spending hours and days and long weekends teaching Sophie how to read people, how to look into every movement and word, how nothing was a coincidence or chance. It was Gabrielle that taught her how to use all of that to her advantage. The art of grifting, Gabrielle explained during those first few months together, was a complicated, but beautiful mess and there were only two rules one must remember at all times.
Rule number one: trust no one and protect yourself at all costs.
Rule number two: if you respect rule number one, Gabrielle explained, you will never need rule number two.
They started in Paris. Sophie watched with keen interest as Gabrielle used her wits and beauty to manipulate a billionaire into handing over the combination to his vault, leaving all of his jewels and money vulnerable to the very person he least suspected of debauchery. After, Gabrielle took Sophie on her very first trip to the States, to Boston, where they grifted their way past security at the Gardner with nothing but a distraction, a smile, and a police uniform that hugged in all the right places. They proceeded to steal Vermeer’s The Concert, three Rembrandts, and a finial in the shape of an eagle from the Napoleonic flag that Sophie simply could not resist.
The grift, Gabrielle explained, always started with a lie that was cultivated and strengthened until it formed the perfect truth.
Gabrielle taught Sophie how to create aliases – people who were facets of herself, that possessed a history with just the right amount of truth so Sophie would never forget the intricate details. Sophie spent a bitter winter in Moscow inventing Annie Kroy. Later, she spent a warm spring in Prague inventing Isobel and a summer in Berlin concocting the long, sordid history of Katherine. It was in London, as she buried old ghosts, that she started the long, painstaking process of breathing life into Charlotte. Sophie gave these women families, histories, birthdays and anniversaries. She gave them pasts, presents, and futures. She perfected accents, picked up languages along the way.
She used all the lies she spun to con both women and men out of their priceless antiques and art, out of millions of dollars again and again and never once felt guilty about it. Never once looked back.
Sophie fell in love over and over again with that spark, that thrill that coursed through her during every lie, after every job well done.
Most of Sophie’s early twenties were spent traipsing across Europe, conning wealthy businessmen and the descendents of royals out of their fortunes and prized possessions. Anthony came and went, a few other retrieval experts as well, and after a couple of years it was just Gabrielle and Sophie, reinventing the art of grifting one con at a time. Their relationship, the trust between them cemented after every score, every mark successfully taken. Sophie trusted Gabrielle and Gabrielle trusted Sophie, although, years later, they both would see the faultiness in their line of thinking.
At twenty-one Sophie was an heiress to an oil fortune in Saudi Arabia who left a wealthy young sheik with nothing but a penny to his name. Later, she was the long lost descendant of the Bourbon Dynasty in France that destroyed a marriage by swiping sfamily heirlooms and jewels and bedding the handsome young royal. She spent her twenty-third birthday on a yacht in Greece, seducing a man with little effort and manipulating him into handing over his entire fortune worth millions without a second thought. They took a long vacation after that success, the two of them traveling east, to Dubai, conning their way into a suite in the Burj Khalifa.
This was where they met Jeremy.
This was also where the whole façade came to a screeching halt.
Jeremy was a tall, dark and smooth-talking American. He found them, their names synonymous with success and fortune even a world over. Sophie immediately distrusted him. She saw the dishonesty in his eyes and in the way he carried himself. Gabrielle made the fatal mistake of falling for him instantly. Sophie’s concerns were voiced, but Gabrielle insisted that he could be trusted, insisted that she trusted him and that meant that Sophie should too. There was a certain amount of truth in that, and against her better judgment, against every fiber in her being that said not to, Sophie decided to trust Gabrielle, and by default, Jeremy.
With Jeremy in tow, the cons they performed became grander, increasingly complex. He was always pushing the limits, pushing them just to the point of breaking. Gabrielle faltered just slightly under the strain, but Sophie adapted easily by becoming whoever she was needed to be, by playing the roles she was dealt with ease. For a while things went smoothly, for a brief span of time Sophie started to ignore that feeling in the pit of her gut that told her this guy was trouble, that this situation was going to lead nowhere good.
Just as she began to forget, there were rumors, strange men in dark corners, an unmarked van consistently parked down the street from their loft in Versailles.
As soon as Sophie began to let her guard down, Interpol started to close in.
“It’s him,” Sophie told Gabrielle. They were knee-deep in a con that was too big, too grand to be controlled by just three people. “It has to be him. The authorities aren’t closing in because we made a mistake. We don’t make mistakes, Gabrielle. They’re closing in because somebody betrayed us and if it wasn’t me and if it wasn’t you then that only leaves him.”
Gabrielle’s defense of Jeremy was vehement, brutal. She was blinded by lust, her judgment clouded by love and Sophie almost laughed at the absurdity of the situation, right there, right in the middle of a Parisian café with onlookers – some of whom she could only assume carried a badge and a gun under their tweed coats. The Gabrielle she met at a café in London all those years ago would never have allowed this situation to occur. The Gabrielle Sophie met when she was sixteen never would have gone this soft. The battle could not be won; Sophie saw that and accepted it, so instead she moved on, tried to convince Gabrielle to pull back, to shut the con down before it was too late. She took the argument to Jeremy as well, carefully leaving out her suspicions concerning his loyalties. It came as no surprise that both adamantly refused.
In the end, Sophie rationalized that they really left her no choice. While her father taught her how to lie and Gabrielle taught her how to con, it was Sophie that taught herself how to be ruthless.
Once more she found herself leaving in the middle of the night with nothing but the clothes on her back and the book that once belonged to her mother under her arm. That time, however, she didn’t leave behind money and decided to take her fair share of the cut for her efforts. She cleaned out her half of the storage container she and Gabrielle kept in Paris, shipping the art, jewels, and sculptures to an untraceable location in London. Sophie quickly followed suit.
Gabrielle and Jeremy were picked up a week later in Brussels, or so Sophie heard through the grapevine. She could only imagine the look on Gabrielle’s face when she woke the morning after Sophie’s departure, when she noticed the storage container half-empty. If Sophie closed her eyes she could picture the emotions that flickered across the woman’s face – the confusion, the anger, the betrayal, and then, finally the understanding.
Rule number one, she had told Sophie all those years ago, trust no one and protect yourself at all costs.
Sophie was not foolish enough to make the same mistake twice.
*
As a whole, the team decides to take a vacation both from conning – so they say, anyway – and each other.
It is Nate who suggests it despite having no plans to do the same himself. The others agree readily because the lull after San Lorenzo was meant to last much, much longer until Nate called upon them so they could steal a mountain, again, and afterwards everything just became more and more complicated as the weeks and months went by.
Parker decides on Madrid because the Prado has just implemented some very intimidating security upgrades and Parker likes to challenge herself whilst proving she is still the best. Eliot doesn’t tell anyone where he is going, but Sophie imagines it involves solitude, fishing, and beautiful women who inexplicably like those sorts of things. She also knows that he will stay close, constantly resisting the urge to go completely underground, making it easy to find him if they look hard enough. And Hardison, well, Hardison doesn’t exactly say where he’s going, or if he is even going anywhere, but Sophie suspects Madrid is definitely on his itinerary.
Nate is expectant when he looks at her then, as the conversation unfolds around them. It’s a look she knows too well, a look she loathes – it is one that clearly gives the indication that even now, even after all the ways she has proven her loyalty to both him and their team, he still doesn’t trust her fully. Nate holds onto old betrayals, is better at grudges than all of them combined, and is waiting for Sophie to uproot their lives again by leaving. Eliot and Hardison argue over something menial and rather insignificant and all Sophie can do is laugh, really, at the look on Nate’s face because she simply cannot wrap her head around the fact that he still doesn’t fully trust her. She simply can’t understand how after everything they’ve been through together, after everything they’ve been through together in the past week alone, they are still constantly on the cusp of trusting each other, but never quite there, never willing to commit fully to the action.
It’s just as much her fault as his, this distance that is constantly between them. They are first and foremost creatures of habit, people that avoid change at all costs. Nate may have stood before her, bloody and broken but mending no less than two hours before and said that he was going to make some changes, that he had plans, but they both know saying the words and meaning them is completely separate from actually following through. Still, Sophie swallows around the slight bitterness in the back of her throat and lets it go in the hopes that one day it won’t be so difficult. In hopes that since now some of his ghosts have been buried they can move on together as a collective unit instead of two separate entities that just happen to be on the same trajectory.
So when Hardison calls over his shoulder to ask her where she will be headed so he can make the arrangements, Sophie merely mumbles something about Portland, shrugging in Nate’s direction as if to say what did you expect? His smile twists at the corner of his mouth for just a moment, but Sophie catches it easily, more in tune to Nate than most people are to themselves.
After the others head in their mostly separate directions, Sophie sets about packing what little they brought with them into boxes, and making the arrangements to have it taken above ground and shipped to Portland via the few acquaintances she still keeps in New York. Nate tries his best to help, but his shoulder protests every time he moves to lift something. Sophie catches the grimace every time because even her most worthy opponents were never able to hide anything from her and Nate has history working against him. She mentions the doctor tirelessly, but he stubbornly refuses.
So, mostly Sophie packs and Nate plots, researching ideal locations for future offices and apartments in the downtown Portland area. She packs the fragments of their lives gingerly into boxes and it is as she carefully places the portrait of Old Nate into a crate that she remembers a time, not too long ago, when she found herself at a crossroads of sorts, much like now. She remembers how difficult it had been to exist in a world she and Nate used to share without his presence bleeding into every aspect of her life. How even after she returned home from trying to find all those pieces of herself that she’d lost along the way, she realized she was no closer to discovering the truth of who she was under the lies and facades than she had been before she left.
It had surprised her then how much easier it was to accept the unknown with her team by her side. How even without Nate there to support her in ways only he could, she still kept him close – slept in his bed, drank his coffee, used his mug every morning out of spite even though he would never know the difference.
She wonders if he is privy to that. If when he returned home he could still smell her perfume on his pillows, if he noticed the faint stain of lipstick along the rim of his favorite mug or the slight flecks of make-up and mascara on the porcelain of his bathroom sink that she didn’t have time to clean up. She wonders if he knows all of that, if he realized how much she missed him, how much she needed him both now and then, if he would still look at her the way he did earlier – vulnerable and full of distrust, waiting for her to run out at any moment.
Mostly Sophie wonders if he, too, has stopped considering home as just a location, a place with four walls and a bed to rest and started attributing it to people again, to their team like she has.
On the plane to Portland Nate grumbles about the sling that she’s making him wear on his arm well into take-off. His mutterings only decrease when Sophie finally flags down a stewardess and asks her to bring him a glass of vodka with a splash of orange juice so her sanity could be spared. Some time into hour two, when she’s finished flipping through both her magazines and the ones compliments of the airline, she pulls out a copy of The New York Times and passes him the Sports pages without a mere thought.
When Sophie is halfway through the first section, Nate says, “You could have gone to Paris, you know. Or anywhere, really. I would have been fine.”
She pauses for only a moment, her eyes scanning the last line of the article twice before she moves on. As she turns the page, careful not to dirty her fingers with the ink, she merely replies quietly, “I know.”
“I mean –”
“I know what you mean. And if I wanted to go to Paris, I would be in Paris right now. You of all people should know that.”
Nodding, Nate turns back to his portion of the paper. “Okay.”
By default, Nate is a terrible conversationalist. Even before, even when their relationship was in its infancy and they were running and chasing each other around Europe, it took a large amount of coaxing, conning, and whiskey to get him to open up to her. Even then the outcomes were minimal at best, both of them working overtime to keep the other at arms length, only letting them close when it was strategic, when it would garner them that elusive upper hand. History makes Sophie privy to the knowledge that there is a very small window of time where one can easily segue from something he specifically wanted to talk about and onto something altogether different without Nate shutting the conversation down.
Therefore, Sophie has learned that the window she has is miniscule at best, so before it can close completely she says, “We need to get better at this, Nate. We need to learn how to communicate with one another outside of work.” She has to stop herself from adding, and by we I mean you, because it isn’t entirely fair and he wouldn’t hesitate on calling her on it.
He surprises her completely by replying, “I know,” so quietly she has to strain to hear him over the hum of conversations surrounding them and the faint roar of the jet’s engine in the distance.
It’s more of a response than she expected, than she ever could have hoped for, really, so she takes it and holds on. Starts thumbing through the next section of the paper, passing him the one she previously finished for when he’s ready, and focuses on the weight of his breaths as she reads. Sophie falls asleep sometime after with her head on his shoulder, her body curled into his around the armrest between them.
When she wakes hours later, the first thing she notices is his ink-stained fingers wrapped securely around hers.
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